Promotion

Cronenberg talking Eastern Promises sequel

I find it hard to believe that David Cronenberg would consider a sequel to one of his films, but he is, and you can see why he's considering it when you think of the ending of Eastern Promises (Filmstalker review), the film which saw Viggo Mortensen playing a member of the Russian mafia ordered by his boss to kill an innocent woman who is pushing her nose into some of their more unsavoury dealings.

The ending of the film didn't exactly line up for a sequel, but what it did do is make the character of Nikolai even more intriguing, and I'd love to know what you thought, but I would have liked to have known more.

“We are going to have a meeting very soon between me, Steve Knight and Paul Webster to discuss what the script would be...I have some very strong ideas about what I would like to see, but I would like to hear what they have to say as well. And then after that, if all goes well, Steve goes away and writes a great script. If we all like it, we make it.”

He raised the point that he had never wanted to make a sequel before now either, but explains why.

“...in this case, I thought we had unfinished business with those characters. I didn’t feel that we had finished with Nikolai and we had done a lot of research that was more than we could stuff into that one movie.”

There's no word if any of the co-stars wish to return, and while I think Naomi Watts' character, the midwife who was getting into the mob's business, could easily be left out for a sequel, and at a push so could Vincent Cassel's character, the rather unstable gangster. However there's one character we would have to see more of, Armin Mueller-Stahl as the head of the Russian mob.

His scenes were superb quite frankly, a wonderfully created character who was far from the traditional leader of a mob character and had some scenes where his family life was at the fore with a brooding sense of menace beneath.

I don't know about you, but I would love to see an Eastern Promises (Filmstalker review) sequel with Mortensen's character at the fore, and with the whole team looking like they're keen to create it, I think we're definitely going to see it come to fruition. Cronenberg himself is pretty positive. How positive are you?